The fault · clicking, beeping, grinding
The clicking you can hear isn't data being destroyed — yet. It's the heads losing their bearings and trying again, and with every pass they sweep across the platters that carry your files. Take the power away and the sweeping stops; stop early enough, anywhere in Exeter, and the odds stay firmly with you.
Talk it over with an engineer
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| The error | What it usually means | Step one |
|---|---|---|
| Rhythmic clicking, one to three beats a second | The heads can't read the servo marks that tell them where they are — so the arm parks and tries afresh, endlessly | Power off now |
| A faint, high-pitched beep — usually a 2.5" portable | The motor can't turn: its bearing has locked, or else the heads have stuck to the platter and are holding it | Don't shake or tap it |
| A grinding, scraping noise | Heads in contact with the platter — a live head crash | Every second under power eats data |
| Musical chirps during spin-up | Calibration failing — often the aftermath of a knock | Leave it off, leave it be |
| Bursts of clicks with silences between | The drive keeps resetting itself after runs of failed retries | Cut power mid-loop |
| Clicks only when certain files open | A single weak head, or damage limited to one band of platter | Stop the copy; image it instead |
Your device is logged under its own case number the day it arrives. An engineer finds the fault, tells you plainly what stands a real chance of coming back, and writes you one fixed quote. Nothing is charged for that look, nothing obliges you, and paid work starts only when you say so.
No drive here gets electricity before its mechanics and surfaces have been checked. If a clicker must run, it runs on our terms: seconds at a time, supervised, and never left to loop.
Failed head stacks are exchanged for matched donors, locked spindles released, and heads lifted cleanly off the platter where they've stuck. The drive needs to last one complete image — nothing more.
A hardware imager takes the disk softly — bad zones stepped around, the weakest ground left till the end — until a healthy copy holds everything, and that copy is where the file system gets rebuilt.
Before any fee falls due you see a full listing of everything recovered and approve it. Your files travel back on brand-new media, return postage on us, and the case stays open until you've confirmed everything opens on your own machine.
Why 'off' is the whole strategy: heads fly a few nanometres above the platter surface — no margin at all once something's wrong. Across our clicking-drive cases, the strongest single predictor of success is simply how quickly the power was cut after that first click.
Five years of EPOS records sat on a disk that arrived ticking about once a second. It took two donor head assemblies and one slow, gentle image before the accountant had the whole ledger — and the shop met the VAT deadline.
Usually, yes. Clicking means the heads can no longer read — not that the platters hold nothing. With matched donor heads fitted and a patient imaging pass, most of these drives surrender most of their contents. What does the damage is running the drive on, not the sound itself.
No. It dates from a much older breed of drive. A freezer adds condensation and contracting metal to the mechanism, stacking corrosion and new harm on top of the original fault.
That click is the heads sweeping for factory servo tracks, missing, and dropping back to the ramp to retry. Snapped heads, a failing preamp and scored platters all click alike — diagnosis is what tells them apart.
No. Software has to work through the heads, and when those are failing, every scan it runs demands precisely the reads that finish the drive off.
Each power-up of a failing device takes more data with it. Open a case first — the look-over is free whichever way it goes.